Detroit deconstruction plan has share of obstacles

The skyline of the city of Detroit is shown Thursday, March 14, 2013. Gov. Rick Snyder announced that he has chosen Kevyn Orr, a partner in the Cleveland-based law and restructuring Jones Day firm, as Detroit's emergency manager. Snyder's already declared a financial emergency in Detroit, saying local officials lacked a plan to solve it. The move makes Detroit the largest city in the U.S. to have its finances placed under state control. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya)

DETROIT (AP) — In more than 20 years of demolishing eyesore houses in northwest Detroit, community activist John George has recycled old wood into all sorts of things — a floor for a coffee shop, birdhouses and doghouses, and sawdust mulch for community gardens.

But the one thing he hasn’t turned salvaged wood into is money.

Faced with the hassles of selling, he has found it easier to gift the recovered lumber from old houses to people who will use it for new purposes.

“We’ve toyed with selling, but you have to have a warehouse and a larger staff and insurance,” George, the founder of the nonprofit group Blight Busters, told the Detroit Free Press ( http://on.freep.com/14iz9mp ).

Advertisement

Yet turning wood and other materials from Detroit’s thousands of vacant structures into cash is exactly what some visionaries are now proposing. A few pilot programs are under way, and the recent Detroit Future City report, a vision for the city’s long-term recovery, cites a robust “deconstruction” industry as one path to creating jobs and cleaning up the city by creatively reusing material from demolished structures instead of just trashing them.

Deconstruction, the report said, as part of a broader repurposing of vacant land and buildings, would help to put Detroiters back to work, bolster the tax base, and turn one of the city’s most notorious liabilties — vacant buildings — into an asset.

“The physical transformation of the city will spur significant job and business growth,” the report said.

The liability goes well beyond the economic to the safety of schoolchildren, who are forced to walk by abandoned homes through dark streets, and to the fostering of crime. Abandoned homes and other idle structures have become havens for drug use and scenes of violent crimes; the most recent a triple homicide March 7 witnessed by at least one child inside an abandoned home in west Detroit.

But the desire to rid Detroit of such eyesores by creating a market for wood and other reclaimed material faces major obstacles, the same as with many other suggestions in Detroit Future City.

Some obstacles are economic. Suburban landfills profit from the current practice of sending demolished Detroit eyesores to landfills instead of recycling debris; so do suburban townships, which collect hefty fees from landfill operators.

Erin Kelly, a landscape architect with the nonprofit agency Next Energy in Detroit, said a thriving deconstruction industry could keep that potential profit inside Detroit.

“We’re giving a lot of resources to other townships in the region, where if we had ways to keep all of waste inside Detroit and process it, we could create more wealth for ourselves,” she said.

But the obstacles to making deconstruction a paying business go beyond landfills. Detroit still needs to create a complete business infrastructure for deconstruction, including a trained workforce, warehouses to hold inventory of recovered materials and a sales network to buy and sell materials.

“If you look at what’s going to make deconstruction a viable thing in Detroit, you need certain pieces of the puzzle,” said Robert Chapman, executive director of the WARM Training Center in Detroit, which a year ago established Reclaim Detroit, a pilot operation reclaiming wood from demolished homes. “You need a trained workforce. You need to have a supply. You need to have a demand. And you need to have a retail outlet.”

As of now, the question of whether a significant deconstruction industry can grow in Detroit remains unanswered.

“The potential for the industry is really a good question,” Chapman said. “I’ve joked that I’m not worried about the supply. I’m standing next to a forest and I’ve got a chain saw. I just need to know that somebody’s going to buy firewood.”

There is, of course, an illegal underground trade in salvaged material.

Metal thieves steal copper and other metals, including radiators and other fixtures, out of empty houses in Detroit, and not just from abandoned eyesores.

New owners who are renovating a vacant house often report coming back a day after installing new plumbing to find it all gone.

Salina Ali, logistics manager for the nonprofit Reclaim Detroit, said her crews often compete with thieves at the site of a vacant house.

“We’re in a constant battle of getting there before scrap people do,” Ali said.

George of Blight Busters agreed. He said he sees scrappers at work “all day long” in his area in northwest Detroit.

“A lot of times we’ll give them the metal out of our houses we’re demolishing just to keep them from stripping a good house,” he said.

Rob Anderson, director of the City of Detroit’s Planning & Development Department, said he would like to eliminate this illegal trade by fostering a legitimate deconstruction industry.

“I don’t how you can possibly pin down a number, but the cost to this community is absolutely enormous” from illegal stripping, he said. “It’s preventing us from renovating some homes that are trashed.”

So far, a handful of nonprofit operations, including the Architectural Salvage Warehouse and the WARM Training Center’s Reclaim Detroit operation, have done modest deconstruction efforts.

Right now, artists working in wood and some building contractors buy from Reclaim Detroit’s warehouse on the grounds of the Focus: HOPE warehouse in northwest Detroit. Other artists and contractors salvage their own supplies from abandoned houses.

But these efforts remain modest. In the year that Reclaim Detroit has been operating, it has deconstructed just a handful of houses, although it expects to increase that to about 30 houses this year, Chapman said.

Also, a coalition of groups known as S3, including Next Energy, has purchased 10 houses in the Springswells district in southwest Detroit and will study how much labor it takes to recover each type of material. The goal is to establish a baseline for large-scale recovery.

“We know how to do deconstruction. We know how to get people out on a site and unbuild a house,” Kelly said. But “how you do it at the scale of a neighborhood and how you do it with housing in Detroit is something that people are in the process of figuring out.”

One idea is to “crowd source” the recycling of material. Kelly said the S3 operation will experiment with demolishing a house and then let the public come and take away the salvaged bricks, lumber, doors and other material. That will cut down on labor costs.

But a huge amount of basic organizing remains to be done for deconstruction to meet its potential. Guy Williams, chief executive of the nonprofit Detroiters Working for Environmental Justice, hopes to see more action soon.

“Had we invested in that five years ago and gotten our crew training going, it would have been a very robust sector right now,” Williams said. “We’re really letting that opportunity slip through our fingers by not investing in the right infrastructure and supporting the opportunities for our economy that are right there at our fingertips.”